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Posts tagged with the category Collaboration

Culture Clash: China and the Plight of the Tibetan People

As Nancy Southern pointed out in her recent post, engaging with China presents certain challenges because of the different value systems in play. China has moved extraordinarily swiftly to become the world power it is today, and its values do not include an emphasis on individual rights and liberties that are part of civil society in the U.S.
At a...

Family Code of Conduct: Getting Everyone Together to Listen, Learn, and Grow

A family is a delicate edifice with a natural tendency to fragment, split, and move in different directions over generations. New people enter as spouses and children with their own interests, preferences and life styles. But when a family shares ownership, oversight, and dependence on shared investments, they challenge this tide. Such connected...

Engaging the Dragon: Learning Across Cultural and Political Divides

Last year, opportunity came knocking at our door in the form of a dynamic young Chinese woman who expressed interest in taking our organizational systems Ph.D. program to China as an offering to Chinese business and government executives.
Having done my dissertation research in China, taught in another American university program in Beijing, and...

Protesters: Lessons for the "Persons of the Year"

I had a sense of déjà vu when I heard that the “protester” was Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
I remembered images of the Chicago protesters who arguably denied us the experience of President Hubert Humphrey and my personal memory of the huge protest of the arrest of Black Panthers in New Haven.
My role was to...

What If Corporations Ran like the Federal Government?

Imagine our private organizations operating like the federal government. What if we belonged to parties inside our workplaces and chose to work or not based on what our party determined? What if we could refuse to implement a needed plan just because our party does not agree?
I have been working in private for-profit and non-profit organizations...

Harnessing the Energy of Opposites

How do today’s leaders create profound innovation in the face of complexity? According to an executive report by the IBM Institute for Business Value, they do it by “embracing dynamic tensions.”
In a report released in July, "Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity," Barbara J. Lombardo and Daniel...

Crucial Conversations and Emotional Intelligence

If there is one simple ability that makes the most difference in effective leaders who are able to enroll other people in their projects, it is the ability to initiate and reach resolution in areas that arouse anxiety in either party. That same skill enables people who are not formal leaders to move from feeing frustrated and powerless to empower...

Good Enough: Progress Not Perfection in Our Organizations

The notion of perfection has been on my mind a lot lately. While working with a group that is feeling the pressure and uncertainty of the challenges it is confronting, I notice the discussions seem to swirl around a notion, unspoken but heard by all: “Whatever we do, it better be the right answer—we can’t afford to fail!”...

Stories of a Storyteller: Perspective is Everything

I remember covering the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life in April 2003.
Well, sort of.
I was four months into my internship with The Miami Herald at the time covering the civic beat in the town of Miami Lakes, a suburb about 30 minutes northwest of Miami. I landed that intership after stringing for the newspaper for more than a year...

The Relational Self: Are We Merely Experiencing, Using, or Encountering Each Other?

In his book, I and Thou, Martin Buber asserted, “God is present when I confront You. But if I look away from You, I ignore him. As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. But when I encounter You I encounter him.”
What a profound and spiritual contextualization of the self and other—the relational self.
Acknowledging...

A Little "Pecha Kucha"

The phrase pecha kucha means "chit-chat" in Japanese.
In 2003, two European architects created a new type of presentation that they christened Pecha Kucha and the format of this presentation stays true to its name. A Pecha Kucha is a community session where individuals present an idea in a structured PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides...

Polarity Thinking: Learning to Accept Both Sides of an Argument

Russ believes in equal opportunity. He looks down on the greed, the disparities, and the selfishness that, he believes, presently dominate U.S. culture. The way Russ sees it, the individualistic view that's caused all of the country's current economic problems overshadows our ability as a society to create a system that takes care of all...